Simplifying the trip planning experience for millennials, with an AI-powered travel assistant

The Challenge

Eddy Travels is a travel tech startup based in Toronto, Canada. Founded in August 2018, the startup developed an AI-powered assistant that provides personalized travel suggestions. Travelers can send a text or voice message to Eddy Travels and discover the best flights, hotels, car rentals, and other travel-related services in one place. The digital assistant is already available on the most popular messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Viber, Slack, and Line.

Initially, the team used Dialogflow for natural language understanding. However, the dialogue could not deviate from pre-defined flows and Eddy Travels had no control over the source code. It was hard for the team to maintain the platform, and difficult to collaborate. There was no easy way to set up the required test suite to evaluate the performance of the digital assistant.

The Solution

As an open source platform, Rasa is much more customizable - it allows Eddy Travels to change any piece of code to suit their specific needs. For example, by customizing the machine learning models, they improved the assistant’s ability to handle more complex language structures and achieved better results, reaching high accuracy as a result. They also have full control of their data and do not have to share it with any third parties.

Eddy Travels’ focus remains on improving the assistant’s language understanding, adding more high-quality travel products and services, and expanding the level of personalization. The Canadian-based startup is planning to launch Eddy Travels on WeChat and WhatsApp messaging applications and develop their own mobile app later this year.

Switching to Rasa was a great decision. It accelerated the development of our AI travel assistant and significantly improved the assistant’s ability to handle more complex phrases. We are now able to process thousands of conversations each month with 96% accuracy, which resulted in better user engagement and more searches per conversation.

Edmundas Balčikonis, Co-Founder and CEO of Eddy Travels